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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of
as salient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in
their every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every
branch of thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their
utter ignorance of science shows this, and paradoxical as it may
seem, their art, in spite of its merit and its universality, does
the same. That art and imagination are necessarily bound together
receives no very forcible confirmation from a land where, nationally
speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first and the last easily
last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality that their
artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and later
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